Disrupting Our Own Thinking

I think anyone who’s ever worked for me would say, I tend to be very direct. I think the shortest path in a conversation is usually the most helpful approach. And I also tend to be really interested in injecting an opportunity for wonder and exploration, I actually think especially in what we’re doing, at Waymo, creating a space for robust debate, not needing tidy answers, getting comfortable with lack of pieces of information that are just unknowable, challenging ourselves in our assumptions of what we believe we know that maybe the disruption isn’t us disrupting, maybe it’s how we disrupt our own thinking.

And so I think being willing to be in that discomfort is a big part of how I try to lead, and I think it’s a big part of what doing something that’s never been done requires. So, it’s actually like pushing me as a leader to get better and better at that.

I love where you’re going with this. And then if we were to break it down further, how do you cultivate that type of culture where people get comfortable with being uncomfortable?

I think openness. I think we have to, you know, at all levels of an organization, we have to have hard conversations, we have to demonstrate curiosity. Sometimes that curiosity is about the issue that we’re grappling with. Sometimes the curiosity is about the gap that we have and the way that we see the issue.

If you come at it from an engineering perspective and I come at it from a commercialization perspective, those are really important, valuable ingredients to coming up with the right answer but we don’t actually have the ability to see each other’s perspectives through the same expert lens. And so how do we create a space where you can understand the values that I’m emphasizing and I can understand the values you’re emphasizing so we can make the best decision for the business?

And I think having senior leaders who model that. We’ve been making sure that our senior leaders get together and do this difficult work and hash out some of these issues, and I think it just builds trust.

It actually, I think, results in better answers to every decision that we have to make because at least there’s a higher degree of competence that the right conversation was had.